1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a method of establishing an integrated information system and its structure and, in particular, to a method and its system structure for integrating information objects in different databases so as to share information.
2. Related Art
For computer software products recognized by most consumers, they can be classified into system software and application software. The former is the necessary software to construct or establish a computer system, whereas the latter is the tool used by usual companies, education units or individuals.
From the viewpoint of the system levels, one can have the following basic levels:
Operating system, such as the UNIX or Windows 95, 98, NT system;
Database management system (DBMS);
Product data management (PDM) system.
As to some large application software or information management application software, one can classify them as:
CAD/CAM/CAE software;
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software;
Production management software, such as MIS, MRP, MRP II, CRP, JIS, etc.; and
Office automation management software.
In the computer information network of an enterprise, there may be many different systems (such as the UNIX and PDM) and many different information management application software programs (such as CAD, CAM, CAE and MIS). In such a huge and complicated enterprise information network, any user may face the difficulty in searching data or sharing information distributed among different databases or even being stored in different systems.
This kind of enterprise information network has another problem, namely, the problem of data storage resource waste due to duplicated data. For example, the marketing department needs some structure data of a particular product (such as the list of elements, the assembly diagram, etc). However, due to different systems or the fact that the required data are not stored in an accessible database, people in the marketing department cannot retrieve the related data already existed in the R/D department. Therefore, the marketing department is forced to set up the data of this product in their own system or database. This causes data storage resources waste and lowers the efficiency in the enterprise.
Thus, how to integrate the data or the related information stored in different databases or systems and build up their connections so as to achieve the goal of sharing information and reducing resources waste is the subject of the present invention.
It is a primary object of the invention to provide a method to integrate information objects stored in different databases.
It is another object of the invention to provide an integrated information structure that enables the links among different information management software modules developed separately and information objects distributed in different databases so that different software modules can communicate with one another and share the information.
The techniques disclosed herein take an item master as a basis. Related information stored within each database can be linked and integrated together through some item master. Information stored in different but related databases can also be linked together through a tree structure formed according to the item masters in all databases. This achieves the ultimate goal of integrating and sharing information among different databases.
The disclosed method includes a means to establish an information module. The method mainly takes a 3-tier structure containing a bill of material (BOM), an item master, and a related information object to establish an information module that links the BOM, the item master and the related information object. With such an information module, products (such as some commodity or project) in some database and its related information can be integrated together for the convenience of a user to manage or utilize them.
The disclosed integrated information structure takes numbers of the above-mentioned information modules as its constituent elements. Through these information modules with such a 3-tier structure, all the related information belonging to a particular product, project or information object in the same database can be integrated. For information modules in different databases, the present invention further utilizes the tree structure of the item masters in different databases to construct a special linking structure that links information modules distributed in different databases. Therefore, the information objects among different databases can communicate with one another and the information can be shared.